Cornwall city council is ramping up efforts to prevent further funding reductions for the Glen Stor Dun Lodge facility.

At Wednesday’s budget steering committee meeting, financial services general manager Tracey Bailey informed council the city will receive $60,000 less from the province to run the lodge, which houses about 130 long-term care residents in the city’s east end.

The $60,000 reduction means the city would have to use $42,000 in property taxes to cover the funding shortfall. The city’s lodge partner, SDG, would have to cough up $18,000.

While the amounts are miniscule in relation to the city’s overall $170 million budget, council is still concerned that further reductions are possible uin the future.
Mayor Leslie O’Shaughnessy said the city already deals annually with less money from the province’s municipal partnership fund.

“The province has no money left, the federal (government) doesn’t either,” the mayor said, leading to cutbacks to municipalities — “at the bottom of the totem pole.”
The amount of money the lodge receives from the province is based on the “acuity”, or needs, of each individual lodge resident.

“If there is a shortfall, we are not allowing the level of care at the lodge to fall behind,” O’Shaughnessy said after the meeting.

Coun. Andre Rivette said long-term care residents deserve the best care that can be offered to them.
“Those residents are past pillars of our community, they are pillars of our community,” he said.

O’Shaughnessy agreed with Rivette the city and SDG need to make a stronger case to the Champlain Local Integration Health Network (LHIN), which divvies up health ministry money to health-care facilities in the region.

That prompted Coun. Claude McIntosh to warn the city should not expect much when “the province is basically broke.”

There was also concern expressed about the lack of representation that Cornwall and area have on the LHIN board.

The issue of non-representation had come up before to council when Rivette had attempted to get LHIN to increase the number of long-term beds available in Cornwall and the surrounding area.